Peter Clothier2015-03-03T15:58:59-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=peter-clothierCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Peter ClothierGood old fashioned elbow grease.Jim Morphesis 'Wounds of Existence': Art Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.67478402015-02-24T18:37:29-05:002015-02-24T19:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/"Jim Morphesis: Wounds of Existence" at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. In part, it's the sheer, intense, sometimes massively over-the-top materiality of many of these "paintings," with their surfaces of nailed broken planks that might have been rescued from a demolition site, or the ooze of concrete and magna (acrylic resin paint), the sparkle and gold and glitter. In part, it's the purposefully broken quality of composition, line and texture. In part the physically explicit passion for the fleshy human body, both male and female...

... in part the obsession with entropy and death; in part the emotional energy that reaches out from the surface of these artworks and grabs the viewer with its peculiar intensity.

Morphesis has been exploring such things for a good number of years now, and it's good to see that dedication rewarded with a solo museum exhibition. (My only wish is that it could have been a more extensive one than this...) Even at a time when it ran counter to the mainstream, his art was unafraid to take up the challenge of those issues that confront us simply at the level of our existence as mortal human beings: such things as pain and vulnerability, love and sex, the metaphysical struggle between belief and disbelief, religion and existential doubt; and, eventually, between the light side of our nature and the dark. If we can bring ourselves to gaze with sufficient attention into its disquieting depths (and this is sometimes, truthfully, no easy task) his work is powerful enough to overcome any reserve we might bring to it. The artist's process requires him to look fearlessly within; it invites us to look with equal fearlessness into our own inner lives.

Emotional intensity aside, Morphesis is an artist who pays serious attention to the work of those who preceded him, and who grounds himself firmly in the authority of tradition. In the series of crucifixion paintings in which he addresses his childhood associations with the Greek Orthodox church, for example, he evokes the images of Matthias Grünewald and Velasquez...

The raw impasto of his wounded, sometimes tortured naked human figures recalls the disturbing paintings of Chaim Soutine. He mines the deep well of archetypal images from the history of art and poetry--the rose, the skull...

... that have for centuries resonated in the human consciousness, creating a powerful subtext of cultural reference that enriches these paintings with echoes from the past. Similarly, the written words and texts that lie half-buried in their surfaces bear witness to the artist's restless inquiry into the ageless philosophical questions they address.

The seriousness and profundity of this inquiry is what sets Morphesis's work apart from that of many of his contemporaries. In a culture that often seems content to skirt the surface of those things that affect our inner lives, I find his work to be not only emotionally provocative and intellectually engaging, but also remarkably courageous.
panel, 68 x 64 inches. Collection of Laifun Chung and Ted Kotcheff

]]>Leave Them to It: Some Geopolitical Reflectionstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.66362602015-02-07T11:43:40-05:002015-02-07T12:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/
I'm no military expert, but it seems clear that the only military way to defeat the worst of the aggressors in various parts of the Middle East is by dint of that increasingly irritating phrase, "boots on the ground." There is no shortage of nitwits who seem to think that we ought to bomb the daylights out of the terrorists/rebels/opposition forces everywhere they pop up, destroying them before they can do their damage and spread their poison. Could action from the air have preempted what has turned into a catastrophic civil war in Syria? Whom should we have bombed? Do we know the good guys? And what, in that general region, constitutes a good guy anyway? Even our good friend Israel, let's face it, acts in ways that simply provoke and promulgate more violence. It seems simple-minded to say this, but... it's complicated.

And yet, to walk away from it all does not seem to me an act of wisdom, nor the better part of valor. And I'm not one to believe that it's exclusively about the oil. The broader reality is that the social and political turbulence in the Middle East affects not merely the region, but the globe. We are long past the time when regional problems could be contained within the region. Borders are porous--not only to ill-intentioned individuals, but to vast armies of refugees and shifting populations. The ease and speed of physical movement around the world, along with the ability of a single individual or small cell to create chaos, makes a mockery of isolationism. And masses of refugees, no matter how much to be held in our compassion, will readily destabilize those areas where they seek refuge. In search of better opportunity, a more secure existence, and simple human dignity, whole populations of non-refugee communities are on the move. If Americans fret about their immigration "problem," they should take a look at Europe.

There's no nice, humanitarian solution to all this. There's not even a viable nasty one. With people and peoples in constant motion around the globe, containment is a pipe-dream. The seemingly attractive option to "leave them to it" is, in the real world, no option at all. And we have not even begun to stir into the mix the added complication of 21st century communications, the lightning speed of the Internet and its impact on the rushing current of international events. We are not just implicated. Willing or not, we are involved. We are engaged in situations from which we would clearly rather distance ourselves, if we were able. Our "power" -- our military might, our economic weight, our global influence -- allows us no escape from the responsibilities it incurs, simply by reason of being power. That is its nature. It is engaged. It is a necessary and inescapable part of the engine of a world in motion.

Given all of this, I think Obama is doing well to maintain his precarious balance. The caution for which he is much scorned by those on the right is exactly what it needed. He's a skillful, agile and attentive participant in the continuing and often unpredictable action. We are, unfortunately, in a situation in which steady observation and sober consideration is needed; in which it is wise to be long on patience and slow to action. We have already proved -- surely to ourselves as much as to the world at large -- that we are unable to control the turbulence. Nor are we able to ignore it. Willy-nilly, we're along for the ride, and our vaunted power, unless we wield it with circumspection, compassion and control, is likely to be more of a hindrance than an asset.

The feeling of impotence in the face of the appalling brutality that is casually practiced by the so-called Islamic State is galling. We need to ask ourselves: what does power look like, in such a circumstance. Does it look like aggression? Does it look like retreat? Neither one, I'm tempted to think. Power in this circumstance has to reside in wisdom, restraint, resilience and patience. And the sacrifice, on America's part, of some unhelpful national ego.]]>Night Will Fall: Film Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.65811922015-01-30T14:37:05-05:002015-01-30T14:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Night Will Fall, aired last week on HBO. It's a documentary about a documentary. The original, produced by Sidney Bernstein for the British Psychological Warfare Division in 1945, had the working title, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey -- a purposefully non-dramatic title. It was never finished or released, for what might seem to be largely cynical political reasons. It was based on a compilation of footage shot by mostly British and American soldiers present at the liberation of several of the Nazi death camps. It was made because military officials were convinced that the world would not be able to believe what happened in these places unless they saw it with their own eyes -- and in prophetic anticipation of later deniers. It was the genius of Alfred Hitchcock, who was brought in to assist in the direction, that called for the kind of long, unbroken panning shots -- some with recognizable officials and trusted figures -- that would be impossible to accuse of exaggeration or fakery.

Much of the footage is familiar: the haggard faces and the skeletal bodies of survivors, the piles of naked bodies stacked up like cord wood, the long trenches filled with the remains of the thousands who died, the camp guards, male and female, and the SS officers and men forced to engage in the disposal of the corpses of their mass murder victims, the German civilians from neighboring towns lined up by Allied forces and required to witness what had been perpetrated in their name. We have seen these images, and each time we see them we are repulsed by the barbarity of the Nazis -- and are called upon to reflect upon that sad but unavoidable old phrase, "man's inhumanity to man."

What is new -- and, to me, surprising -- in the original footage are the follow-up scenes, taken two or three weeks later, which show the remarkable resilience of human beings who had lived through hell, had suffered from rampaging typhus and other camp illnesses and had nearly starved to death. The scenes show women sorting through clothes and trying them on ("as women like to do" the commentary noted! Not something any documentarian would dare to say today!) They show survivor couples strolling down tree-lined country roads with every appearance of good health and cheer. The reality, of course, went far deeper than this, after so terrible a trauma. But still, it was a refreshing addition to the visual record. Liberation, which to so many had become an impossible mirage, had in fact arrived.

Andre Singer's Night Will Fall does not attempt a reconstruction of the original film, but it does include an extensive amount of the footage -- mostly in black and white but some, from American photographers, in the newly available medium of color. Singer uses the perspective of a number now-aging survivors, their liberators and responsible officials of the time to describe the experience of that moment in history at first hand; to explain both the purpose of the original film and the reasons for its non-release (some believed at the time that it would have a negative impact on the "de-Nazification" process then in hand); and to detail its subsequent history, most notably its effective use in the war crimes trials at Nuremberg.

Singer's documentary is a heart- and gut-wrenching reminder of that thing that we must "never forget." It is timely, coming at a moment in history where we will soon no longer have either the last of the survivors or their rescuers to bear witness, and will need to rely more heavily on documents such as this. It is thorough and clear in its purpose to carry out the intention of the original, to create the kind of record that would withstand every attempt to deny or minimize this most appalling and sickening event in human history. Because of its historical, and sometimes perversely political perspective, it should be a part of every 20th century history class.

There is one proviso -- one I confess would not have occurred to me until I read this excellent review by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, "Auschwitz Was About the Jews" and realized there was justice to his complaint: that the words Jew and Jewish were almost entirely absent from the film and that, as his title suggests, Auschwitz was about the Jews. There were other victims, who should not be forgotten. There were gays and communists, there were gypsies and (as one commenter points out in the lively and fascinating discussion that follows the Rabbi's review) Jehovah's Witnesses. There were people of all faiths who dared to oppose the Nazi regime. But to make such a film with no mention of the Jews as the primary targets of Nazi hatred and brutality is to do a disservice to the truth.

That said, this is an important, compelling, often enraging and immensely saddening documentary. Each one of us owes it to himself or herself to know about these things, and there is no better way of knowing than to watch it.]]>ROLAND REISS: Art Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.63582942014-12-19T21:59:14-05:002015-02-18T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/
To judge by his current exhibition, "Floral Paintings and Miniatures," Reiss has been working hard to extend the boundaries he himself had begun to establish in those early floral paintings. These new, large-scale works are painted with the same meticulous attention to detail and the same exemplary skill. Formally, they create the illusion of symmetry without being exactly symmetrical...

Formally, too, they work as exhaustive exercises in the delicate art of color composition. Lilies, sunflowers, birds-of-paradise, roses, these floral images float against flat, monochrome backgrounds enhanced with cut-outs and stencils that contrast their natural beauty, with quiet irony, with cultural icons of the contemporary world: the silhouettes of cityscapes, for example, or images that seem to reference the familiar excesses of the art market. In a nod to Manet -- and perhaps, to this viewer, to the meditative serenity of Buddhist practice -- one quartet of paintings depicts the lovely form of lotus blossoms and the outline of lily pads, seen directly from above; and beneath, or perhaps more accurately behind them, as though in the water of a pond, lurk the barely discernable forms of variegated koi fish.

Lilies in Blue, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 44 x 44 inches

As I perused the surface of these paintings, I was struck quite unexpectedly by their aesthetic continuity with the other components of this exhibition: a handful of the exquisitely constructed miniature dioramas that brought the artist considerable renown some decades earlier.

F/X: In Search of Truth, 1990, mixed media, 14 x 24 x 24 inches

Wrought with the same passionate dedication to detail and the same exacting craftsmanship, these three-dimensional mini-dramas required (and continue to require, in the examples included here) the same kind of exploratory looking: the two-dimensional surface of the paintings offers the same kind of visual complexity and invites the same kind of pleasurable detective work as the dioramas. The viewer's eye and mind are drawn into an act of (act-ive) contemplation, moving through surfaces and between objects in a constant voyage of discovery.

When I used, above, the word "delight," I intended it as an accurate description of the actual physical sensation that this artist's work arouses. As viewers, we feel constantly invited in, in a way that makes the work, beyond its intellectual engagement, a rare experience of sheer, genuine pleasure. If the paintings glow with their own peculiar serenity, we find ourselves irresistibly glowing with them. In today's troubled world, such a gift is not to be taken lightly.]]>Ashes Rain Down: A Book Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62726462014-12-04T19:07:58-05:002015-02-03T05:59:02-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/
Sound familiar? This is the world of William Luvaas's Ashes Rain Down, a collection of 10 interconnected stories that was published in 2013 and should, by rights, have been received with far greater acclaim. I suspect it might be in danger of slipping below the literary horizon line, which would be a shame and an injustice. It should be read. Unhappily, it is a totally believable world. Happily, for us, as readers, it is part tragedy -- but also part tell-all reality show and part sheer, exuberant, uninhibited farce.

Luvaas peoples his world with a ragtag bunch of survivors, some hold-overs from the hippie days of the 1960s, some Jesus freaks and biker gangs, some redneck hillbillies, along with a handful of wandering tribes of ne'er-do-wells and marauders. Psycho- and sociopaths, bipolar paranoids and schizophrenics all, they squabble over the meager living to be scratched out amid the intolerable heat and drought that alternate with the disastrous wind-, dust- and rainstorms that result from a rapidly deteriorating natural environment. Lacking much in the way of drugs or alcohol -- let alone food -- their chief distraction is, well, fornication. And they do a lot of that, in sweating desperation.

Reading these stories, we begin to sort out individuals who pop in and out of the events in no particular sequence. Luvaas proves a master of colloquial voices, each one of them different and distinguishable, and we enjoy the constantly shifting tone of the narrative as much as the frequently outlandish events. In a world gone so very much awry, what remains is the oddly surviving nobility of which our species is capable, even in desperate times. This is a world in which humanity is in extremis, clinging on to survival by its ragged fingernails.

We are left with a remnant of hope -- but with the knowledge that we are already too far along this path to a bleak, perhaps inevitable future. We are surrounded by constant and ubiquitous evidence of a changing global climate. We are entangled in seemingly endless wars abroad, and at home our social fabric shows increasing signs of wear and tear. Our infrastructure is on the verge of collapse. We dispense with common civility in favor of a crass me-firstism that threatens to destroy all sense of mutual responsibility and care for the well-being of our fellow humans.

And we are too easily distracted by popular culture, sensationalism, and the melee of social media from powerfully thoughtful voices like William Luvaas', whose wildly creative cautionary tale is so relevant, so urgent, and so timely, and whose literary spunk and sparkle should assure it a place on everyone's bestseller list.]]>Mark Strandtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62581422014-12-02T18:38:34-05:002015-02-01T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/
This is not an obituary. Others will do a better job of evaluating this Poet Laureate's life and work. His contribution and his place in American literature is assured. For me, it is the memory of a simple act of generous friendship that endures.

The year was 1963, and I was living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I had been drawn across the Atlantic for the first time by a job at a grammar school, teaching French and German, and Mark's mother was a colleague on the staff. I was never happy as a teacher. It's a profession I admire greatly, but for me it was not a good fit. I have known since the age of 12 that I wanted to be a writer, a poet, and teaching was no more than a way of earning a living.

Mark came to spend that summer in Nova Scotia. His sister and brother-in-law were there too. Theatrical folk from Toronto, they opened the Neptune Theater in Halifax, bringing culture to the provinces, and hired me, during my summer break from teaching, as their house manager. A new world began to open up. And knowing Mark to be something of a poet -- his first book, Sleeping With One Eye Open, was published the following year -- I ventured to ask him to look at a handful of my poems.

Kindly, he read them. And more kindly still, suggested I'd do well in the Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he had recently graduated and was teaching at the time. He would help me. I applied. With his support, I was welcomed with a grant and a teaching assistantship, and moved to Iowa the following year. Lived there for four years, and completed a doctorate in Comparative Literature before moving to Southern California to teach in academia.

I spent some time with Mark at Iowa, but he was already by then in a different league--one of the teachers at the workshop, and on the way to becoming the justly celebrated poet he became in later life. I was in awe of him. The man projected a self-confidence I had never felt. His quiet, even gentle exterior belied, I knew, an inner strength that I could only aspire to. His every move expressed a confidence and self-assurance I wished I shared. It would be some time before I could begin to find my own path, and it would prove quite different from his.

We met once more in New York, years later. I'm no longer sure quite how it happened, but, generous as ever, he invited me warmly to visit him in his apartment. By this time, I had moved on from writing poetry to writing about art, and what I remember most about that visit was the impressive library of art books he had assembled. The apartment, it seemed to me, was a true poet's lair, a place where inspiration lurked in every corner and on every tabletop.

That visit was a short one, and was not to be repeated. But it was pleasure to follow his successes from a distance, and with gratitude for the change his generosity brought into my life. I read of his death with sadness and, despite the fact that we never knew each other well, a very personal sense of loss.]]>'Rosewater': A Film Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62090122014-11-23T20:37:26-05:002015-01-23T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Daily Show. I love that your satire holds the feet of politicians to the fire. But your film... well, someone needs to say this: it's not what it's cracked up to be. I think that, because you're "Jon Stewart," those who write about film have not been honest about this movie. Perhaps, like me, they're simply enamored of the work for which you're justly famous and see the film in that light. Perhaps they honestly believe that it's terrific.

It's not. It's a well-intentioned effort to throw light on the plight of journalists everywhere whose brave work in "bearing witness" to the abuse of power is rewarded by imprisonment and torture. An important message. But the film's most fatal flaw is that it lacks the fundamental ingredient of any good film: drama.

Drama happens through building tension, but nothing builds here. The initial scenes are promising enough, as the protagonist, the journalist Maziar Bahari, falls into the hands of the Iranian political police. And the interrogations begin with an appropriate sense of threat. But from the moment of the first interrogation scene, there's no development, no action, just more words. You don't want the poor guy to suffer more, of course, but there's no delivery on the threat of worse to come. The scenes become repetitive, and predictable, and frankly boring. They go on far too long.

By the same token, simply numbering the days of solitary confinement -- inhuman though this treatment is -- does not make them more dramatic. Even the initially effective visual contrast between blinding white cells and black blindfolds remains somehow undeveloped. The eye longs for more interest and variety.

Advance publicity for the movie suggested, slyly, an important link between the satirical Daily Show skit with Jason Jones posing as an American spy in interview with Bahari. In fact, very little was made of this intriguing possibility, and the dark, absurdist humor I was somehow expecting was so low key, I might have missed it altogether if I hadn't heard about it in advance. All in all, at the end, Bahari's release came as something of an anticlimax. He did not, as the film's protagonist, seem to have undergone the change we would expect. He has suffered, yes. But what has he learned, other than that torture is evil and torturers humorless and inhuman? How has he grown?

So we were left -- I, as a viewer, was left -- with little to have engaged me but the film's message: reporters should be free to bear honest witness to the truth of the abuse of power. An important, even pressing one, but not enough to make a good movie.]]>Men and War: Art Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.61232962014-11-07T16:40:17-05:002015-01-07T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/

The fact that this substantial body of work spans only two years, from 1913 to 1915, is staggering in itself. That they were made in Germany just before and at the start of World War I gives them a special historical significance. That many of them were made in bereavement, as a memorial tribute to the gay artist's gay lover, killed during the first year of action, gives them a particular emotional poignancy and social significance. That they are amazing paintings, as rich in symbolic value as in color, form and texture, makes this an absolute must-see exhibition.

What struck me most was the courage and defiance of these paintings. Though set against a sheer, funereal black ground, the color of mourning, their painterly exuberance constitutes a not-so-covert thumb-in-the-eye not only to disparaging social attitudes about gay men and homosexuality, but also to the patriotic triumphalism that led so many European countries blindly into a disastrous and particularly pointless war. The inclusion of a contemporaneous film of public military events, with troops strutting proudly on parade, reminds us of the absurdly reactionary, puffed-up image of chivalrous masculine valor that compares tragically to what we know of the ignominious slaughter in the trenches of that shameful "war to end all wars." Stand back a ways from "Abstraction (Military Symbols)"...

... and you'll perhaps see, as I did, the ironic image of a knight on horseback, armed with lance and sword, surging forward towards the viewer. But it's no diminishment of the courage of the millions of men whose lives were needlessly sacrificed to say that these were no knights in shining armor; they were simple canon fodder. Add in the almost excessive exuberance of color and the emotional intensity in so many of these paintings, and the viewer comes away overwhelmed by the sheer waste and sadness of it all.

So with all their evocation of military decorations and other references to Germany military power, Hartley's paintings seem to me to carry a satirical subtext: the outward display of masculinity, the pomp and circumstance, is barely disguised vanity. The howl of pain and outrage is as powerful, but also as restrained and subversive as it is in the poems of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, and others who experienced the brutal reality of that war. It is of special interest, I think, that this two-year body of work also incorporates the formal patterning and symbology of American Indian artifacts...

... evoking, to my mind, the aggressive wars conducted by the American military in the course of the previous century, and the enforced cultural assimilation that followed.

Both these wars, let's face it, were the work of men, politicians and generals, and the cavalrymen and foot soldiers enlisted in their cause. The Hartley show leads into a neighboring gallery, where we find the contemporary sculptor, Sam Durant's proposal for a poignant, if austere national memorial to those who died in the wars against the American Indians...

Proposed for installation in the national Mall in the nation's capital, it consists of two long rows of bland, monochrome gray reproductions of otherwise widely scattered 19th century monuments to the dead. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the vast majority of them memorialize the white soldiers who died. The handful of smaller monuments for the Native Americans killed in these actions is clustered separately, between the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool, marking the melancholy distance between victims and aggressors, and the historical prominence of the latter. Dominance, dominion, colonization, these are the deplorable traditions of power established by Western civilization.

For an antidote, be sure to visit the galleries at the opposite end of the same floor of the Broad building at LAMCA. Here you'll find a solo exhibition devoted to the work of the Chicago-based African American artist Archibald Motley, another early 20th century painter, and one inspired in part by by the Harlem Renaissance to celebrate all aspects of black culture. Though they, too, have a satirical edge, his paintings are for the most part wild and joyful. He is fascinated by the diversity of shades of black...

... as well as by the teeming social strata within the black community: his life-affirming pictures feature frenetic jazz musicians and dancers...

... card sharps and criminals...

... as well as high society African Americans, ecstatic church worshippers, and the underclass of working stiffs and bums.

Motley has fared better than a number of talented African American artists of his generation, many of whom have been marginalized by the great, sweeping tide of (Anglo-American!) mainstream art. It's good to see his work justly celebrated in an exhibition such as this.]]>The Political Schtick: Theater Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.60786202014-10-30T17:28:31-04:002014-12-30T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/

Okay, it's a riot. But it's really a pretty sad tale. We men--you women may have noticed--seem to have a hard time controlling our libidos. Or no, it's not really a matter of "control", it's more a matter of knowing how to use our sexual gifts joyfully, to the appropriate satisfaction of our natural impulses and those of our partners; and of knowing how to do so without causing pain to those we love or to ourselves. It's not the penis that's at fault, it's the way that it's handled (again, please, no pun intended!)

We do love to hate our politicians. We have reason to hold a good number of them in contempt. Our current flock is notably incompetent. Inflexible, humorless, pontificating, phony-patriotic, self-assured in the worst possible way, they seem incapable of the kind of action we expect from our elected leaders. The "system" is in part to blame: they spend a great deal of their time prostrated at the altar of money, incurring indebtedness to the wealthiest donors who naturally expect something in return. But it's the same system that attracts the kind of "professionals" who neglect the needs of those they are supposed to serve in favor of their own self-interest--which primarily takes the form ego satisfaction and eventual re-election.

Still, these four guys and their penises... They are properly skewered in "Tail! Spin!", and by nothing other than their own venality. It requires little clowning on the part of the actors to make them look at once pathetic and absurd. The male cast--Arnie Burton, Sean Dugan, Nate Smith and Tom Galantich as the principals--are ably assisted by assisted by Rachel Dratch...
of SNL fame, who plays a series of dubiously dutiful wives as well as a truly hysterical Barbara Walters. The action is enlivened as each of the principals jumps into roles other than his own: we have lawyers and journalists, page boys and fellow congressmen all joining in the farce. The set has the familiar appearance of the debate stage, but the podia are no more than props for lively antics.

We laugh at them all, but remain painfully aware of the damage wrought by such men not only on the rapidly eroding trust in our political lives, but particularly on their suffering families and wives. Their overweening arrogance, their apparently unshakeable belief in their own invulnerability, their contempt for everything but the satisfaction of their own lust, is not only laughable--but appalling. Regrettably, such exemplars of our sex also ask us men to take a good look in the mirror and see the (somewhat distorted) reflection of our own libidinous selves! If we're not conscious how we use it, the penis has a lot to answer for.

Eventually, though, it's all about power, isn't it? It's about men who, out of their own desperate insecurity about their manhood, need to assert false dominance--and mistake the penis for the proper means to do it. Submit to my rod, submit to my rule. That's the tragedy behind this farce.]]>A Mystery Solved? Art Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.59931462014-10-15T19:08:25-04:002014-12-15T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Amelia Earhart buffs might be surprised to learn that the remains of her aircraft, widely reported to have gone down off Howland Island in the South Pacific, made it all the way across the Pacific Ocean to the Santa Monica Bay, where it was only recently rediscovered and successfully raised from the ocean floor by the artist Dan Van Clapp. His evidence is currently on improbable display at Future Studio Gallery in Highland Park.

All images courtesy Future Studio Gallery

Seriously, you'll be astonished by the verisimilitude of the artist's recreation, not only of the cockpit and a large part of the fuselage of the Lockheed Electra 10 E that Earhart was flying on the final, fateful leg of her global circumnavigation attempt, but also various severed pieces of the plane and other memorabilia--headset, helmet...

... a sodden logbook, and so on. It's a tour de force of deceptive ingenuity and legerdemain. You'd swear the tire is made of actual decomposing rubber...

... the fuselage and the visible remaining engine parts of metal. No. It's all illusion, crafted with enough skill to fool both eye and mind. You go up really, really close and you still can't tell that this torn metal fragment is actually a piece of paper.

Von Clapp's installation intrigues the viewer at a variety of levels. The artist teases us optically, of course, but also challenges the obsession with mystery and celebrity that drives the unending search for Earhart's plane. He plays with questions of historical truth and our perception of reality, the way we view, and reconstruct our history, and bestow mythic stature on our heroes. In the absurdist tradition, he seamlessly blends tragedy and sly humor; we can't help but smile at his trickery. His meticulous reconstruction is also an act of love, an homage to the woman whose feisty and indomitable courage is a reminder that the spirit of adventure and the embrace of danger are not the exclusive territory of men.

It's a remarkable achievement, and one that merits the trek to a less-than-familiar part of town. We art folk tend to travel familiar paths, and too often miss what calls out to be seen. We tend to look for the familiar names, and tend to pass over the ones that are less familiar or unknown to us. Too bad. We're the losers for it.

Meantime, kudos to Dan Van Clapp for a show that shouldn't be missed. I'm only surprised that he didn't create the famous aviator's earthly remains. But perhaps that's something best left to the imagination.]]>Wounded Leaders: Book Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.59781662014-10-13T15:33:02-04:002014-12-13T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion, by Nick Duffell.

First, don't assume from this book's subtitle that is irrelevant to us here in America, or to our leadership. It is of vital relevance, no matter the specificity of his argot. Nick Duffell's title will have resonance for anyone who has lived through the past couple of decades in America and watched our own wounded leaders in action -- or, more correctly, inaction. That said -- and we'll come back to this -- his central argument is that the boarding-school educated governing elite in Britain are themselves unconsciously governed by the lasting wounds incurred by the experience of being sent away from the family at an early age, and placed in a militaristic environment in which they learn to protect themselves from a hostile outer world.

I can speak to this. I am what Duffell aptly refers to as a Boarding School Survivor. As a practicing psychotherapist, he has a long-standing practice designed to bring such people back from their emotional disorientation and isolation. I could have used his services, long ago, but had to discover my own path through this maze. I was sent away to school at the age of seven, and by the time I escaped to freedom at the age of eighteen, I had received a remarkable head-oriented education but remained what I often describe as an emotional cripple.

I had learned the costly and dangerous art of evasion and emotional invulnerability. As a seven- or eight-year old, I could not afford to do anything but suppress the feelings that would open me up to attack from my fellow-boarders: fear, anger, sadness, grief, the terrible pain of being separated from parents who assured me that they loved me -- even though it was hard to understand the paradox of being loved and yet exiled from the family, the locus of that love.

The result of my excellent education was that I never grew up. Rather, it took me another three decades before I realized there was something wrong with living like a turtle in a shell. Boarding School Survivors, as Duffell describes them, are stunted individuals so caught up in their heads that they remain disconnected from their hearts. I simplify his profoundly well-informed and subtle arguments, whose bottom line is that Britain's ruling elite, boarding-school and Oxbridge-educated, are supremely unqualified to lead in our twenty-first century world because they get so intently focused on their distorted, rational vision of national and global issues that they remain impervious (invulnerable) to the bigger picture of human needs. They are unable to listen, to empathize with others than themselves and their own kind. They are guided by the certainty of their own sense of rectitude. To doubt, to question, to have a change of heart is to be vulnerable, and vulnerability is the last thing in the world they can allow themselves. (Duffell's final chapter, on doubt, is particularly eloquent and on-target.)

I am admittedly unqualified to evaluate the more technical aspects of Duffell's argument. To this reader, he seems impressively knowledgeable and up-to-date with the latest discoveries of neuroscience and academic psychology. He draws on a broad understanding of the philosophical development of rationalism and its critics, the countervailing social movements of repression and rebellion, and contextualizes his argument in that historical perspective.

In our contemporary times, his exemplars are primarily the likes of former Prime Minister Tony Blair, England's current Prime Minister David Cameron, and London Mayor Boris Johnson, whose attitudes and actions are profoundly -- and in Duffell's view -- mistakenly reactionary. As he sees it, they bully and bluster their way past opposition into futile military actions and social programs that enrich the already privileged and wealthy and contribute to the continuing impoverishment of the needy. No wonder the England he describes is an angry country.

Late in the book, Duffell expands his vision of an entitled elite to include brief reference to American leaders -- in particular, of course, George W. Bush, whose blind and reckless pursuit of a delusory obsession rushed us headlong into the war with Iraq. The disastrous results are with us today, in the form of a Middle East in unending turmoil. Looking at America today -- a nation of people surely as angry as the British -- I'd argue that what Duffell calls the Entitlement Illusion is by no means limited to British elitism.

Our leaders must also be counted amongst the wounded. Our leadership is dominated by the squabbling of little boys who have never grown beyond the need to protect themselves and their own territory from those who do not agree with them. Our political problems are the same as those Duffell describes in his country: militarism, misguided and prejudicial rationalism, a lack of empathy for the poor and underprivileged, an assumption of rectitude that rejects other views without a hearing, an angry rejection of doubt or reappraisal of previously held views.

Entitlement, I'd argue, is not the exclusive property of the British elite. I myself believe it's also, more broadly, a factor of historical male privilege, the patriarchal tradition. There is a persistent myth in our culture that sees men as rational beings, in control of events, capable, practical, while women are (still, in the eyes of too many of us men) perceived as irrational, guided by emotion rather than reason, and therefore less competent in leadership positions.

Duffell argues passionately for a middle path, one that minimizes neither reason nor emotion, but balances the intelligence quotient with the emotional quotient, the head with the heart, reason with compassion and empathy. I agree with him, that unless we as a species can find that balance, we are in for dangerous times ahead. His book is a timely and important reminder of the need to "change our minds" in a fundamental way, and open ourselves to the powerful -- and practical --wisdom of the heart. I sincerely hope that the book will find readers beyond the native country of which he writes. Its insights are profoundly needed everywhere, throughout the globe.]]>Obamatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.59031342014-09-29T17:30:13-04:002014-11-29T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Matt Bai's recent article about Gary Hart in the New York Times Magazine (Sunday, September 21, 2014) brought to mind how the rash, naughty-boy action of a mindless moment could alter the course of history. Back in April, 1987, Hart had a commanding, quite possibly insuperable lead in that year's presidential race. An otherwise thoughtful man of steady purpose and subtle, complex ideas, he had the makings of an excellent president, and one who might have led the country in a very different direction from the one that we have taken. Instead, we elected George H. W. Bush, who in turn enabled the election of his wayward son, George W. -- incidentally, no less a little boy than Gary Hart.

To revert to the old cliché, Hart simply couldn't keep his penis in his pants. In this, he followed in the footsteps of great American Presidents -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John Fitzgerald Kennedy come to mind -- along with vast numbers of prominent and less prominent politicians. Even popularly sainted figures like Dr. Martin Luther King were not immune from this masculine propensity. Hart was merely the first of many to be publically outed by the press, and he must have been surprised as well as chagrined by the outcome. After all, it was not that the media were in ignorance of the philandering of those precedents; it was just that it had always before been regarded as personal, something between a man and his conscience -- and quite possibly his wife; but certainly none of the voting public's business.

We are all the worse for Hart's alleged bad behavior (he has never, apparently, copped to any unseemly act). Worse than its questionable morality, it was frankly stupid. The fact that his taunting remark to the press in that challenge to "follow me around" was entirely disconnected, according to Bai's article, from the investigation that exposed him, is basically irrelevant. In retrospect, the man staked a historical shot at the presidency on a casual flirtation. And lost. We all lost, because since that time the important issues in presidential (indeed, in all other political) campaigns have been sacrificed to "gotcha" moments--whether a slip of the tongue at an incautious moment or a weakness of the flesh. And not least because his defection did much to enable to country's subsequent -- and apparently persistent -- slippage from rational political centrism to the fanatical and demented extreme right.

We would do well to reflect on our attraction for what Carl Jung called the puer aeternus, the ungrown boy -- a man whose grandiose self-image and belief that he can do no wrong blind him to the realities of the world and lead him into the kind of ill-considered and reckless action that crippled the Hart campaign. It is a character flaw that crosses party lines. We suffered through George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and its disastrous consequences, but also through Bill Clinton's (Hart-like) inability to keep his libido in check and the consequent costs to both his presidency and the country. We may reflect further upon the fact that the narcissism -- and, alas, the charisma -- of too many grown-up little boys lands them in leadership positions everywhere, where they squabble like schoolyard brats for dominance and territory rather than address with any seriousness of purpose the urgent problems that confront us in the world today. The damage they do ranges from the trivial to the potentially catastrophic.

As for our president, Barack Obama, others may disagree with me, but I persist in seeing him as a man amongst these boys. I watched last night as he answered his interviewer's questions on CBS' Sixty Minutes. He listened -- occasionally interrupting, certainly, but answering the questions that were put to him without prevarication. He copped to his own mistakes. He allowed of others' views. He admitted to contradictions. He did not attempt to disguise his willingness to change his mind in changing circumstances. He spoke clearly. He refused to be bullied. He showed no trace of squirming, even when faced with questions that seemed antagonistic or accusatory. His body language suggested that he remained calm and comfortable within himself.

Those who have read Obama's books will know that he has worked in considerable depth on the defection of a father that too often prevents boys from growing into men. They will know that his relationship with his mother was, by compensation, strong, and that he experienced that period of adolescent rebellion through which he learned his independence. I believe that a man's strength is defined in part by a healthy balance between the yin and the yang, the masculine and feminine principles. True strength lies not in intolerance, inflexibility, and macho posturing, but rather in the ability to listen, and hear, and understand; and to incorporate the needs and feelings of others with one's own; to reflect and weigh the results of actions before taking them. Compassion is a healthy part of strength, as is the ability to change one's mind, to admit failure, to learn from experience, and to try another course.

I count myself a leftist. There are many things in Obama's presidency I wish he had not been constrained to do. There are many things I wish he had had not been obstructed from doing by implacable opposition. But I do not stand with those on the left who allow their own passions to blind them to his real achievements and who -- childlike, in my view -- chafe with impatience and anger at his failure to implement their own ideal agenda. I admire the apparent ease to deflect, perhaps even to absorb the hatred and the adamant obstructionism that has been directed against him since his first day in office, and to get on with the job with which he was entrusted. These, as I see it, are the qualities of a man of integrity. I am glad to have such a man at the helm in a time of global crisis.]]>The Making of Them: TV Documentary Review (belated)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.58965042014-09-28T14:39:25-04:002014-11-28T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion, a recent book by Nick Duffel, (I'll have more to say about the book in a later post) and came across a reference to a video made in 1994 for the BBC, The Making of Them. I had an exchange of correspondence with Nick Duffell some fifteen years ago, at the time of the publication of my own memoir, While I Am Not Afraid: Secrets of a Man's Heart. I'm no longer sure how it came about, but I heard about the organization he had founded, Boarding School Survivors, and the title immediately struck a chord. I am, myself, a "survivor" of the British boarding school system, and was pleased to learn that someone was seriously addressing the issues I had been struggling with for my entire adult life.

"The Making of Them" is about the earliest stage of the private boarding school system, the "prep" school. Boys--and girls, but I was obviously at an all-boys school; my sister has a similar story--are sent there by their parents at the age of seven or eight, and spend their early education there until about age twelve, when they move on to "public". i.e. private boarding school. What I remember most from that time in my life is the intense loneliness, the homesickness, the sense of alienation and difference from all the other boys. In retrospect, much later, I learned to acknowledge that I was suffering, but would have been unable to formulate such a recognition at the time. As an act of self-preservation, if nothing else, it was necessary to conceal it. Vulnerability was not an option. I created for myself a fine, extremely effective coat of armor--and wore it for another four decades. I still find myself, today, shielding myself from the unkind world out there! I am still uncomfortable with my body. I still "hold myself in."

The BBC documentary brought these memories and feelings back with force. At several points, I found myself holding back (see?!) the tears. Granted, things had changed much between 1994 and when I first went to boarding school, in 1943. I was seven years old. Funny, I often hear myself saying I was six, but I must have been seven by then. These days, to judge from the documentary, the teachers and staff make a far greater effort to be kind and compassionate. I watched with interest, for example, how a small group of the boys themselves gathered protectively around a little lad who was suffering from homesickness. In my day, that kind of vulnerability would have been met with jeers and teasing. Even the school environment seemed friendlier, more open to individuality and expressive freedom. The periods of separation from the parents seemed much shorter: three weeks was mentioned. My own terms lasted an three interminable months, three times a year. With luck, your parents might come down at mid-term to take you out to lunch.

I watched those parents in the video, thinking of my own. How they felt, said, persuaded themselves that this was "the best thing" for their children. But their facial expressions and body language betrayed quite different feelings than their words. I noticed how a mother, picking her son up to bring him home, asked the leading question, "Was it wonderful?" To which the boy could only answer, yes. The discordance between words and body language on the part of both the parents and their sons is, at times, painful to watch. Like these young boys, I was unable to be truthful with my parents: at huge sacrifice, they were buying me the best education they could think of; it was my job to be grateful, not to whine. But at what cost, to live so great a lie?

So it's a slightly more enlightened time, I think. At one moment, I watched with envy how a mother hugged her little boy in a genuine effusion of affection, and told him--in parting!--that she loved him. How, he must have been thinking, if she loved him, could she drive off and leave him? My own mother could never have hugged me in that way at Victoria Station, where they left me off. My father would shake my hand to say goodbye. So, yes, things have changed in many ways for the better. But still... the impact of the documentary is unmistakable: the institution of the boarding school is no substitute for what young children need most at this time in their lives, the love of their parents and the security of home. (I'm tempted to add that it's not only boarding schools that cause the childhood wounds which, unless we work to heal them, we carry around with us for life. But that's another story...)

I note with curiosity that there are two ways of hearing that title phrase. Until I watched this documentary I had heard only one of them--"The Making of Them"--the one with the emphasis on the last word: Them. The boarding school system is geared to creating a specific class of people, them, a peculiarly British elite, the ones who go on to Oxford or Cambridge and who generally end up running the country. O lucky me! I am one of them, and I have traveled many miles on my nice educated English accent, my charm, my finely educated mind. I "should be grateful," and in so many ways I am. I account myself one of Them.

But then I heard one of the mothers say the words in a quite different way: "It's the making of them," she said. I registered the difference with a shock. It was like one of those optical illusions, where you can't see one aspect of the image until you blink your eyes, and then can't see the other. Of course. I had never heard it, in my mind, with this particular emphasis. This way, it gets to be the justification, a positive rather than a negative. This way, the mother could allow herself to believe that the experience was a fine way for her son to build the character he'd need to be successful in his future life.

In this context, I'll confess to a part of myself that listened to the grown men in this powerful and moving documentary, products of the boarding school system, with the knee-jerk response: they're "wet," to resort to the boys' school terminology; they're "pathetic." These extraordinarily privileged men actually feel sorry for themselves. Such was my conditioned reaction; and in this way was my conditioning so powerful, it triggered that judgment over decades of sometimes deep inner work and reflection. Because I recognized myself in them, these men who had come to understand the depth of the wound they had sustained, and the lasting effects it can have on a man's life--including, but not limited to the ability to form trusting relationships and engage in simple expressions of love. Like the hugs my wife reminds me again this morning, as I write, I am too reticent to share...

Please note: you don't have to be a "boarding school survivor" to find deep resonance in this documentary. You just need to have survived your childhood. Which, likely, if you are reading this, you have done.]]>Valley Vistatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.58964902014-09-28T14:33:55-04:002014-11-28T05:59:01-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/Chomsky's Vessel, the Gary Lloyd piece selected for the show, and wanted to see the rest of it. I knew that I'd find many old friends there.

This proved to be true, and there was certainly a nostalgic element to my delight in "Valley Vista." The Valley was its own hotbed of creative activity back in the day when Los Angeles was still on the cusp of recognition as an important center for contemporary art. In fact, it was Lloyd's 1971 solo show at Orlando Gallery in the Valley that first inspired me to start writing about art. "Valley Vista" is a great documentation of that activity, reminding us that the art world can be unkindly selective in those it chooses to celebrate instantaneously and soon forget; and those who manage to maintain, some even enhance their reputation.

... Judy Baca's sketches for her monumental murals. (Danieli, as those who were around at the time will remember, was also an influential teacher and a widely published art critic, whose death at an early age was a significant loss to the art community. He was one of the chief movers and shakers in the San Fernando Valley, along with his wife, Edie Ellis-Brown, whose "Fluorescent Egg Sculpture" is also included in this show.) On the more traditional side, there are also two paintings by Hans Burkhardt, an inspired charcoal drawing by Steve Galloway with its multiple historical echoes, and an impressive cast resin sculpture by Bob Bassler--a work that surely rivals those of his better-known contemporaries. Celebrity is a fickle friend.

Despite the inclusion of these--and indeed many other accomplished, more conventional works--the majority of the artworks in "Valley Vista" are cheerfully subversive, reminding us of the pervasive influence of conceptualism at the time. The assemblages of Esteban Bojorquez, the photographs of Robert E. Von Sternberg, John Divola...

... Mike Mandel and Ed Sievers, among others, and the display cases of posters, flyers and magazines all take us back to the day when ideas, and often words, became an important part of the artist's language, as well as of the continuing dialogue between them. In one of the "LAICA Journals" put out by the Los Angeles Institute of contemporary art, I spotted an example of my own early art writing, the review of a performance by the Kipper Kids, reminding me that conceptually-based performance, video, and other post-studio media were also beginning to flourish in the early 1970s.

Subversion--whether political, social or aesthetic--is the keynote of "Valley Vista." While serious in intent, we can be grateful that much of it is light-hearted and light-handed. I walked around with a big grin on my face, a frequent chuckle, and an occasional burst of laughter. Consider, for example, Mike Mandel's prescient "selfies"--four decades before the iPhone came along--posing his skinny, long-haired hippie self in front of a long line of cops in riot gear at an anti-Vietnam war protest...

... or between a young African American woman and two elderly white suburbanites on a park bench; in "Impersonations"--deadpan "homages" to his own art heroes--Scott Grieger's photographs replace the iconic Robert Irwin disc with his head, a John McCracken plank with his body...

A large number of works in "Valley Vista" share this kind of fake, ingenuous simplicity and modesty of means, qualities I happen to value greatly in a work of art. Benjamin Weissman's "Others' Tombstones" juxtaposes whimsical, anthropomorphic gravestone figures with typewritten qualifiers: "BACKS TURNED," "COULD BE ME." Jeffrey Vallance pokes fun at suburban values (and eating habits!) in the photographs and assemblages put together as a tribute to Oscar Mayer Wiener...

A delight in the absurd is the characteristic many of the assemblage works. Michael C. McMillen's "Mystery Mummy," enshrined in its museum display case, is a part of his Mystery Museum spoof on our cultural institutions. Stuart Rapeport's "The Right Tool for the Job" is a fine example of the artist's sharp, if offhand humor. Encased in a smart aluminum attaché case, his modified paint brushes (the forked brush, for example, is the right tool for the indecisive moment) offer a gentle mockery of the pretensions of the art world.

Stuart Rapeport, The Right Tool for the Job, 1968-72
Found aluminum attaché case with seven expressive brushes
(courtesy of the artist)

Does all this subversion still hold up, some thirty or forty years later? I ask myself how much of my enjoyment of this wonderfully diverse and multi-faceted show derives from my having known and enjoyed the company of many of the artists back then; and from my simply having been there, immersed, myself, in the cultural climate of the time. Do you have to have "been there," in that time and place, if you want to "get it"? But then, of course, that's a part of the point: the whole idea of "timeless art" was being challenged by these artists, intent on demonstrating the art can well be of the moment, a simple aperçu, grasped, sketched out, or photographed without grand notions of its own importance.

A fine catalogue accompanies "Valley Vista," with a text by the exhibition's curator, Loyola Marymount art history professor Damon Willick and contributions by some of the artists included in the show--all of which give useful context to the time and place mentioned above. One quibble: why no page references in the checklist of artworks at the back? An annoyance to anyone, like myself, who needs to constantly leaf through to find the images he's looking for. Ah, well. As they say, you can't have everything...]]>Boyhood: Not Exactly a Film Reviewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.57914582014-09-09T12:51:03-04:002014-11-09T05:59:02-05:00Peter Clothierhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-clothier/
I woke this morning thinking about Barack Obama, and how perfectly he fits the model of manhood proposed by Rudyard Kipling in his unjustly maligned and frequently parodied poem "If." In case you don't remember it, here's how it starts out:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise...

Doesn't that sound like Obama?

First, though, Boyhood, which provoked these thoughts. We finally got to see this beautiful and profoundly moving film last night. I loved the 12-year journey of these skillful and committed actors, playing out the emotional development of fictional characters engaged in a fictional narrative as they themselves physically aged. I loved the "truth" of the story itself, of a family struggling with the realities of life -- the failed and failing marriages, the financial woes, the abuse of alcohol and drugs, sibling love and feuding, school and the relationships with classmates, the pain of the teenage years, and so on. All along, start to finish, the story had the convincing "feel" of life as most of us experience it.

And the film is true to its title. It is about boyhood. Even at the end, the young boy, Mason, whose life we have been following from elementary school to college has not yet emerged fully into manhood. The last shot shows him, literally high in the beautiful natural surroundings of the mountains, and high on the mushroom fed him by his brand-new college roommate. With a lovely young woman at his side -- they sit still shyly side by side and not in some false, premature embrace -- he gazes out in ecstasy into the landscape as though into a future filled with allure. But it is abundantly clear that he is still a boy. Boyhood still glows in his face; he's all promise, no completion.

Which should not surprise us. He had no models of real manhood as he was growing up. Mason's biological father is a charming rogue in his early years, unable to accept the responsibilities of marriage, job, and family. The subsequent relationships his mother forms are with men whose manhood is as questionable as his father's: a smooth academic whose insecurities lead him to drunken tyranny, a former military man whose immaturity is revealed in his insensitivity and inflexibility. With one notable exception -- a photography teacher who attempts to move our Mason beyond his obstinate, lethargic adolescence -- the strong, mature figures who surround the growing boy are women. The men are simply grown-up little boys.

Which leads me to reflect, beyond the parameters of the movie, upon this question: What are the qualities of manhood? We find what I think of as a real man all too infrequently in our contemporary world. We are surrounded everywhere by ungrown men: the drunks, the abusers, the workaholics; priests and teachers who take advantage of their positions of trust and exploit the vulnerabilities of children; lovers who take what they need and reject responsibility; politicians who lack the spine to govern and capitulate too easily to those who would manipulate them; gun-toting idiots who insist so stridently on their "rights" and are quick to spurn the rights of others; sports heroes pumped up with illicit drugs and phony testosterone; spoiled cultural idols, many of them scarcely more than teenagers.

Too often, the models of manhood we are offered are characterized by a false notion of strength. To return to the president and his current predicament, surrounded as he is by well-meaning progressives to the left and fanatics blinded by their own rectitude on the right, all nipping at his heels and demanding displays of strength. They fail to understand that the qualities of true strength are not intellectual inflexibility and rash, foolhardy action (the former president and his enablers come inevitably to mind) but the maturity to step back and take the longer view, the wisdom to listen and, when necessary, to change. Even to bend. That too is strength. They have not learned the ancient lesson of the oak tree and the reed.

The qualities of manhood, in my view, are these: integrity, a sense of mission, a devotion to service. We know how to teach these qualities. We do it with our military men in boot camp (women, too, these days, of course, but I'm concerned here with men). While I'm not a fan of militarism in any form, I'll concede that in most cases even this crass form of initiation can produce admirable men -- men who have not only strength and skills, but a sense of purpose greater than themselves. Our armed forces are worthy of the respect that they receive. What turns boys to men is this kind of ritualized initiation -- a process that's significantly lacking in the development of the youngster who's portrayed in Boyhood, as it is to the majority of us today. Of myself, if I'm to be honest, I must acknowledge that I reached some measure of manhood only in my fifties. For genuine initiation in our culture we have substituted such tepid rituals as Christian confirmations and bar mitvahs.

They don't do the trick. In traditional cultures, the transition was a far more dangerous journey, involving genuine threat to life and limb as boys were sent out into wilderness or jungle to temper the vulnerability and fearfulness of boyhood into the steel they would need to function as a man. We in the modern Western world have no wild animals to deal with, unless we count those within. We forget that these are powerful enough to rule our lives if we don't learn to acknowledge and confront them. The early myth of initiation for us is the ordeal of the knight apprentice, who rides out into the forest to test his mettle against the dark knight -- or the dragon -- and returns prepared to serve his queen.

What is integrity? In simple terms, it is the fortitude to say fearlessly exactly what I mean, and do exactly what I say. Which implies, of course, a clear vision about who I am and what I am given to do. If I'm in doubt or confusion, I lack resolve. I dither. The answer lies not in denying doubt and confusion -- they are a part of being human. No one escapes them. In denying them I risk precipitous and futile action, when what I need first is to consult the inner wisdom that I've wrestled with myself to find, and rediscover the clarity before I act. A man of integrity is a man who "has his act together," in the sense that his actions are in full congruence with his words. He has "integrated" the four mainstays of his being: mind and body, feeling and spirit, and they are properly in balance. Action that is not backed by all four of these in unison -- action that lacks thought, or heart, or energy, or purpose -- is as ineffectual as the failure to act at all.

Inseparable from a man's integrity, then, is the understanding that he has left behind the innocence of boyhood, along with the freedom that accompanied it. He lives in a world of accountability to others and acknowledges his duty (yes, sorry, a quaint, old-fashioned concept!) to serve others than himself. Sadly, it's true that most of us fail to live up to this ideal. We look around us, searching vainly for the most part for our Mahatma Gandhis, our Nelson Mandelas, our Martin Luther Kings -- men who were certainly not lacking in the failings that made them human, but who managed to be magnificently greater than their weaknesses, and of spectacular, historical service to their fellow human beings.

We cannot all be men like these, but we can be men. Without the challenge of traditional initiation rites, we are required to find, or invent, our own journey from boyhood into manhood. It is no easy task to face the darkness and the inner demons that, without our awareness, can control our destinies. All of us need some form of support as we make that journey: a church, perhaps, a spiritual guide, a trained therapist... And the journey, for most of us, is never ending. Who can sit back on his laurels and say with certainty: I have reached the fullness of my manhood? Even in, at best, my last quarter here among the living, I still struggle with my own.

So we leave our young protagonist, in Boyhood, with the journey into manhood still ahead of him. He may already have been initiated into sex and drugs, into the drudgery of work and now, finally, the college dormitory, but none of these has opened the door to the real, deep, inner work he will have to do if he is to become the man he needs to be if he is to fulfill his life's destiny. And that is yet to come...]]>